


How You Feel in Me

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Awkwardness, F/M, First Time, Porn with Feelings, Season/Series 04, Smut, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 12:55:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11104992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: The first time with Daryl, Beth isn't sure what to do about the fear he's obviously feeling. But maybe, to push through it, all she has to do is get him to focus on a different feeling - and tell her about it.





	How You Feel in Me

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally written to [a great anonymous prompt](http://dynamicsymmetry.tumblr.com/post/161340110036/have-you-ever-considered-a-bethyl-one-shot-wherein) (thank you again, Nonny) inspired by "Tell Me" by Billie Myers.
> 
> It's set after Still (and presumably before an alternate version of Alone, where I choose to believe everything was wonderful forever) and while it's implied that Beth and Daryl forged a romantic connection then, I'm not going into how. Just assume it's happened. 
> 
> ❤️

It’s only after he’s gone motionless inside her, rigid and trembling, that she understands how afraid he is. 

On top of her and lying between her spread legs, braced over her with his hands splayed on the ground by her temples, head hanging loose and his brow inches from her own. It shouldn’t surprise her, even this first time, that Daryl Dixon himself is a full-body experience. The tickle of the ends of his hair on her cheeks, heat of his panting breath against her jaw, the musky and not-unpleasant campfire smell of him, the way the thin firelight trickles across his bare shoulders and the straining muscles of his arms like a weak little fall of rain. And there _is_ rain outside, rain and steady rolling thunder, and it’s hard - though she knows it’s a cliché out of a century of romance novels - not to think of his heart, only the match is far too perfect, because she can feel it drumming through his body and into hers and closing around her own. Welling up inside her chest. 

In and of itself, it’s not unlike the rain either. 

He’s so much of everything. It’s cool in the barn, wafts of damp air coming in from outside and joining what’s already present, and when she stripped off her clothes one by one it sent ripples of goosebumps over her skin. But every inch of him is like a furnace and he’s shining with sweat, warming her - from the inside out. _Inside her,_ and she’s not some silly little girl thinking about rings and dresses anymore, she knows the score and knows that romance lost the game a long damn time ago, but no one else has ever been where he is. 

That means something. She closes her eyes and swallows, shudders. Lies under him and waits for him to move. She can’t shake the feeling that she should _be doing something,_ though. 

Because he’s not. 

And now all at once, as lightning scorches the darkness outside, she realizes that he’s afraid. He’s terrified. She was so sure he was the bold one, something like twice her age so of _course_ he’s been with plenty of girls - plenty of _women_ \- before her, and he sure as hell looked like he wanted it and wasn’t going to be shy about it. He didn’t take his clothes off, but she wasn’t going to question that because she knows by now not to prod him too much, not when she doesn’t need to, and he has his reasons. But he knelt there by the fire and with round eyes she watched him undo his belt and fly and draw himself out, so thick and twitching in his own fist when he squeezed himself, and he lowered his head and his groan pressed against the broken boards of the stall. 

He never once looked at her. Not merely didn’t meet her eyes; he never _looked_ at her. She has no idea how she missed that. She was naked and spreading herself out on the dry hay, open and ready for him, and she knows she was quivering like the threadbare and frankly pathetic fantasy of the nervous virgin having her _first time,_ but then he was crawling over her with his pants sagging awkwardly around his thighs, gripping her hip and angling her up and thrusting into her hard enough to make her cry out - it kind of hurt for a second but then it was like a deep tingling surge that rushed her breath away - and she forgot all of it in favor of…

Him. 

None of this is going how she ever imagined it would. Not in any scenario, before or after the world ended. He’s not doing what she expected. He’s not _like_ she expected. He’s gone still inside her, his cock flexing against her walls, his body forcing her legs so wide that her hamstrings are aching dully, and he’s too frightened to move. 

So much more frightened than she is. 

For the first time, she wonders if maybe he only did this because she seemed to want him to. Because she wanted him to _service_ her like a damn bull with a cow. And what lurches through her gut is something perilously close to nausea. 

He was supposed to have been with so many other women. Supposed to have _fucked_ so many other women that this wouldn’t truly be all that big a deal.

_Is that what you think of me?_

She has no goddamn idea what she thinks anymore.  
  
Until this moment, she’s been clutching at his shoulders. Now she lifts her hands to his face, hesitantly combs his hair out of the way - and he clenches his eyes shut and flinches. 

Touching her in the deepest way she can think of and he’s flinching. 

Her heart turns itself abruptly inside out. Because he was a storm of guilty, griefstricken rage before and somehow she found a way to handle that, but she’s at a loss in the face of his fear. Like she’s stumbled over something she never saw and now she has to put it back in its place, and she doesn’t know what its place was to begin with. 

“Daryl.” Breathless whisper. She’s having a difficult time pulling together enough air. She’s seen how fragile he can be. He won’t hurt her, she _knows_ that - but she could hurt him. 

Maybe already has. 

The wind slams against the barn door, rattles it so loud that she misses it if he says anything. Pretty sure he doesn’t. Pretty sure that what he does instead is give her a minute shake of the head, and he could be denying anything at all. 

She can’t even clearly remember how they got here. 

“Daryl, are you alright?” She shifts under him and accidentally changes the angle so he’s nudging more sharply upward, and what pulses through her is so sweetly heavy that she lets out a small gasp. His eyes snap open and _finally_ they lock onto her, and if she had any doubt about what she sensed in him… 

“It’s- I’m-” She pulls in a shaky breath, her hands hooked loosely around the sides of his throat. “It’s okay, Daryl, I’m okay, it's… it’s good.” She swivels her hips experimentally and that pulse flares again, and her moan is edged with faint surprise. 

And new desire for him to _move_ already, because she wants _more._

But not if he's… not if this is how it is. 

She licks her lips and gazes up at him. Now that he’s started looking at her he seems unable to stop, hardly blinking, his eyes gone darkly glittering and boring into hers. She can read his features but she can’t read those strange eyes, and that unsettles her. 

“We don’t have to. We can stop.” _Breathe._ Just breathe. Her instincts, combined with everything she’s come to learn about him, are shouting that she can’t make this a bigger deal than it is. Even if, for him in this moment, it’s the biggest deal imaginable. “I don't… I don’t _need_ it, Daryl. I swear I don’t.” 

He shakes his head again, this time more firmly, and whatever else he’s saying no to, she’s beginning to believe it’s not her. He’s stiff as a board, his jaw set, but another spike of lightning pierces through the cracks in the boards and throws stripes across him, lights up his eyes, and what she sees there is something she could never hope to name. 

He doesn’t- “Don’t wanna stop.”

Nothing more than a rasping mumble. But she hears it. 

She moves her hand, slow, nearly stroking him. Trying to soothe. He’s not just frightened, he’s _upset,_ and it can only be with himself. “I don’t want you to stop, either. You’re not… None of this is wrong.” She’s not totally confident he thinks any of it _is_ but it strikes her as a reasonably safe thing to say. “It’s alright. You didn’t hurt me. If that’s- If you were worried about that.” A smile tugs at her mouth, and it feels like a shy one. “You feel good. Like this.” Another circle of her hips, less experimental, and her breath catches in a high little _mm_ when once more he pushes against something right behind her belly. 

And then he releases a shaky sigh and asks her something she never would have expected. 

“How does it feel?”

She blinks at him. Not alarmed, God, no, but this isn’t a thing she’s ever considered articulating, and not only because she’s never technically done this much before. The descriptions in the steamier parts of the books she’s read always seemed inadequate at best and downright silly at worst, and the brief fragments of porn she’s caught glimpses of - files on Shawn’s hard drive that weren’t supposed to be there and she was most definitely not supposed to be looking at - never consisted of much more than a bunch of groans and wails and grunts and _fuck yeah_ s. And the groaning and wailing, sure, that’s probably appropriate, but the words…

But he’s looking at her with a bizarre kind of naked desperation in his eyes. Naked, where he himself isn’t. 

For reasons she may never fully understand, he needs her to talk to him. 

“It feels good,” she breathes again, and then huffs a laugh, not only because she said that already but because it doesn’t really tell him anything. Doesn’t tell _her_ anything. _Good _could mean so many things.__

How is it good? How is it unlike anything she’s ever felt before?

“It feels like… you’re fillin’ me.” Her own shaky breath, and she sees something in his stricken eyes flicker. “You’re fillin’ me up. It’s so warm.” Waves of it washing over and over her, lapping her like an incoming tide. Swelling. She arches slightly and tightens her muscles, and when she lets out a trembling moan he does too. “It’s like…” _Close your eyes. You know what it is._ “It’s like when you bang your elbow, but it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere in me. It’s tingling.” She giggles, surprises herself. “It’s in my _toes._ ” 

Quiet, except the rain. Even the thunder has died away for the moment. Only his ragged breathing, and she opens her eyes and touches his face. 

“It’s like when I was on a rollercoaster once. It’s like when I learned to dive for the first time.” Pause as she searches for it. Finds it. “It’s like fallin’.”

She would swear his breathing stops. His goddamn _heart._ The thunder pounding behind his breastbone.  
  
This time she doesn’t wait for him to catch up. Whether it’s courage or craziness, she’ll never know and it doesn’t matter. She tightens again, feels him twitch, and leans up to ghost her lips over his. 

“Tell me.” 

He makes a noise. She struggles to interpret it, not because she’s having trouble sensing anything in it but because _everything_ is in it, a chaos of things, a handful of beads scattered across a polished floor. His fear but also shock, confusion, and ten different kinds of need. She’s known for a long time that there are things he does want to say, walls he throws himself against and gets angry and frustrated when he can’t break through them, things he does want to tell her and doesn’t know how. 

So it’s not that he doesn’t want to tell her this. Not all of him. 

“Tell me,” she repeats, and her tongue flicks against him. In her own ears, her voice has dropped and roughened, and it’s almost what she would consider sultry. “Tell me how I feel. Tell me how it feels in me.”

The strobing light - the lightning is distant but still there. The weight of him. The way she suddenly wants to rip his clothes off and force him to _be_ with her, show her whatever he feels the need to hide, and maybe he won’t hide any of the rest of this. But she can’t, she won’t, and instead she moves, tilting her hips up and down, and when he slips partway out of her and pushes back in, those tingles gather in her belly like that coaster swooping her up again. 

A whisper against his jaw: “Please.”

His voice; she feels rather than hears it, the hum in his throat. She can tell it’s a single word but nothing beyond that, and she nuzzles him, encouraging. Coaxing. 

“Soft,” he grates, and then he moves like a response to what she did, the same rocking out and into her, and she clutches at him and gasps. “You’re just… you’re soft. Inside.” He hauls in a breath and then his forehead is resting against hers and somehow he’s closer, not _lying_ on her but not far from that, and if his muscles are quivering it’s not with the same tension as before. Not exactly. “You’re so fuckin’ soft, Beth, Jesus.”

She nods, and more laughter bubbles up in her chest. She won’t, she won’t do anything that seems like laughing at him, but it joins the tingling and now it’s like her belly is full of little birds. “What else?”

“You’re hot, you’re-” He breaks off, grimacing frustration, and she feels out like it’s her own. Soft, hot - yes, those things are true, but of course they wouldn’t be enough for him. Of course he would want so badly to get it _right._

She leans up, kisses his neck, moves in a slow undulation that rolls her eyes back. She’s getting braver. She can take what she wants. If he’s afraid she can help him. “Keep goin’.”

Nothing, though he moves with her in a stuttering kind of way, and with her own stab of frustration she wonders if she’s lost him. 

But she hasn’t. 

“You’re all around,” he murmurs, his voice oddly smooth even if the rest of him is rough. “You’re everywhere. You’re all I feel. I can’t fuckin’ breathe, I can’t-” He gasps like a swimmer breaking the surface and plunges on, teeth bared. “Like the garden. At the prison. When we was plantin’, we dug, it was spring.”

It’s clumsy but she gets it instantly and it knocks an _ooh_ out of her as she shifts her hands to his hips, her nails scratching over the base of his spine. The warm, soft earth. A bunch of them loosened it and scooped it aside with their bare hands, but in the seconds in between, when her hands were deep…

Some things you can only describe with other things. Some things can’t be made sense of any other way. 

_Life._

“Daryl-”

But he keeps going. He _is_ talking, somehow it’s flowing out of him as if she’s busted through a dam and nothing is holding him back anymore. Lowering his head as he shoves himself into her over and over and whispering that being inside her is like swimming in the richest part of the summer, that it’s like meat fresh off the fire and dripping savory and making his mouth flood wet, that it’s like falling asleep in the forest back when you could do that and not fear for your life. That he didn’t know it was like this, he never imagined, he’s sorry because he’s getting it wrong but she feels so _good,_ she feels _amazing,_ and this is the only place he wants to be. 

Raking his fingers into her hair with his mouth pressed against her throat and fucking her slow and hard, and moaning that she’s like the fucking sun. She’s burning him.

Maybe that’s why he wouldn’t take off his clothes. Except she doesn’t think that was it. 

Not quite. 

The motions of his hips are increasingly uneven, something that’s a whole new kind of desperate in them. He’s close, all at once she realizes that, and while the way he’s moving is rubbing against her almost the way she wants, it’s only _almost._ She’s awkward and nearly frantic when she wriggles a hand between them and finds her clit with her trembling fingers, but he seems to get it because he lifts up just enough to make room for her, though his mouth is still open against the edge of her jaw, long past coherence. She’s ready now, hurtling herself upward and whining for him to come with her, and seconds after she jerks her body up and releases a short cry and that dense, bright ball of tingling in her belly goes nova all through her, he’s gripped by a violent shudder and a muffled snarl, and thick heat is pulsing into her. 

Into her. She holds onto him, holds on for dear life, and she might be whispering something in his ear as he keeps moving in weak thrusts, moving as if his muscles are on autopilot as the rest of him seeps away into her hands. 

Eventually they’re still again. For a while. He’s heaving above her but calming, all the tension bled out of him. 

He’s not afraid anymore. Not of her. Not of this. 

She doesn’t think either of them has to say more. When she tastes wet salt on her lips she’s not certain if it’s her tears or his. 

The storm is gone.


End file.
